Writing Content for SEO: Quality Over Quantity

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When it comes to the big world of creating content for SEO purposes, it can be very easy to start down the wrong path. There’s a misconception out there that publishing tons of content regularly is the key to getting your site to the top of Google’s SERP. While it’s true that publishing content is a sure way to get your site ranking for a variety of topics, especially if you’re a dedicated blogger, you need to avoid pushing quantity over quality. The key for ranking your content is QUALITY not QUANTITY.

Ranking by Writing Quality Content for SEO

So what exactly does it mean to write quality content? Well for one it means avoiding pushing out pages with thin content. Having good related media on your page is also an easy step that has a HUGE positive impact. Also making sure you’re staying on topic within your post, writing about sea horses in an article about hummingbirds is a sure way to shoot yourself in the foot (unless these topics are actually related somehow then go forth).

We’ll have a closer look at things to avoid and what you can do to publish quality content for SEO purposes.

Thin Content

Thin content refers to pages with, as you may have guessed, little on them. Pages with low word counts won’t contribute anything to your ranking efforts. Between not contributing much information on your topic, and therefore Google considers it to be a bad source of information, users will bounce from that page quickly. A high bounce rate is another signal to Google that what your page offers isn’t relevant or helpfully to the topic you’re trying to rank for.

A study done by backlinko.com found a direct relation between content length and ranking position. As you can see from the graphic above, long content is king. Avoid writing content on your site with less than 500 words, in fact we’d recommend you aim to have a 1000 word minimum for your web content. Just be sure that your long content is all relevant to your topic and not some inane rambling. Stay focused, on topic, and produce something entertaining and informative.

Utilizing Media

People love visuals. Having at least one good image in your content goes a long way to keeping users engaged with what they are reading. As good as images are, what’s even better is the use of a sweet info graphic. These images get a lot of shares since they are a pretty visual that summarizes what your article is about. If you have the option between an image and a good info graphic, choose the graphic every time.
The above graph from Backlinko shows the benefit of using just one image in your content. Don’t go over board when it comes to images; keep them related to the content and of a high quality to maintain their value. One thing that is even better then images and graphics is video. A good short video helps with shares and providing users an engaging piece of content to interact with. Be sure to use appropriate alt attributes on all of your media for accessibility and keyword targeting.

A note on finding keywords

All of the above is essential to getting your reads to be interested in your content, and keeping them reading. There are a few things you need to do to actually begin the process of ranking your article for a topic. The main one we’ll talk about in this topic is keywords.

When you decide to write about a given topic, you already have some keywords preselected for you. Obviously your topic itself is a keyword. Beyond your main keyword you need to be sure to find related keywords in order to try and rank for more than just one word. LSI, or latent semantic keywords, are keywords that are related to the main keyword you’ve chosen.

Finding good keywords can be a bit of a process but is a necessity. We won’t cover researching them here, but if you want to learn how to go about doing this then read on here.

Using your selected keywords

What we will cover in this article is a few pointers on laying keywords into your content in order to get those SEO ranking signals.

To start, make sure your main keyword appears in your title tag, your page h1 tag, and in the first 100 words of your content. These show Google that you place the most importance on those words, and if they don’t appear until the end then Google considers them to be unimportant. Don’t go crazy placing this, or any other keyword, in your content to many times. This is referred to as “keyword stuffing” and your page, and site, will be punished for it as a result.

Your LSI words will come in at this point. Too avoid stuffing penalties with the over use of one word, layering in LSI words in the content in an organic way is the way to go. Since they are related to the main topic they offer help with that rank juice and avoid stuffing penalties. As with all keywords make sure you aren’t going crazy with how many times they appear in the content.

Conclusion

Once you get good at writing your high quality content, utilizing media well, and layering in your keywords appropriately, you’ll begin to see good results. More traffic, higher time on site, and higher rankings as a result. If you put in the work you will see the results.

If for whatever reason you’re unable to do all of this yourself, then consider hiring a professional SEO agency that can see to it for you. NetGain is an agency that specializes in SEO and web development, located in Barrie Ontario, our SEO specialists and content writers can ensure your site is publishing quality content that meets the highest standards in the SEO world.